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9

“A Horror in Body and Thought”–Guest Post by Ewan Munro

Ewan 2013Game of CatchReaders of this blog may recall guest contributions in creative writing earlier posted by Ewan Turner, my son. In 2012 he posted “My Father the Returner,” which won a Scholastic Writing Award and “A Game of Catch Among Friends.”

Ewan’s new contribution is a short story narrated by a troubled physician from an earlier era.

A Horror in Body and Thought

E. Turner, M.D.February 6th, 1887

I shall not profane my medical standing to suggest that the findings in this case have not utterly altered the fabric of my human understanding. The experience I am about to relate fills me with great disquiet, given the outcome of several manifestations that have recently come to light. By nature, I am a skeptic, accepting only reasoned rationale and employ it to detect certain self-induced psychoses. Much discussion of noteworthy events are unproven and thoroughly unbelievable, and yet there are credulous souls who give ear to these unsubstantiated claims. The border of the dream state and that of the waking is often hard to fully determine or detect so I doubt many of the stories that circulate in this age.

But I remain open minded nonetheless and in that may lie my weakness and naiveté. Most in the field of evidence-based inquiry are fortressed away from elements of order that can be called “supernatural” or “mystical.” That nomenclature is loaded with distasteful connotations and does not accurately do justice to the experiences of sensible people like myself who have seen with keen eyes the wonders, nay the horrors of the ethereal occult. The limits of my credulity have been so fantastically strained that I have soberly considered acquiring an occupation at a desk because the effects of this study have been so shattering. My composure is broken and my will remains tied to what transpired, for you see it did not take long for my serenity to wither and die. To fully articulate this transformative instance I must begin at the very moment when our subject entered my life.

His name was Mr. Malcolm Atherton, an emaciated wreck of a man, bent, gaunt and lacking in all colorful flashes of innocence. His shoulders were submerged deep below his creased neck, his posture that of a man with the load of an entire nation upon him. In all of the streets of New York never had I seen such an astounding labor of deficient breath. His eyes were rimmed with what looked like grey charcoal and his hair was a wispy collection of black strands that barely clung to his scalp. As he entered our offices he cried out for assistance in a derisive gurgle that at first shocked the nurse by the door. She grabbed his arm in a hurried motion while her partner called for my assistant and I. Noticing the commotion I rushed over to assist my colleagues and was beset by this ever more frightening sight. Atherton’s legs had given way under the extreme weight that assaulted him, collapsing him in a crumpled heap upon the floor. Drool bubbled at the corners of his mouth and a foul stench seemed to rise off his back. It was a smell so indescribably horrific that it shook the fortitudes of my person. It was the odor of some inhuman dread, the like of which I had not sensed in all my waking years. I could not even begin to articulate the premonitions of malevolence that seemed to radiate off the shrunken frame of this pathetic man.

Wasting no time we hauled him onto an examination table and hoped to pinpoint the exact cause of his astonishingly decrepit situation. My assistant sent for the police as I made desperate attempts to glean any information from the one lying before me. I asked him his name and with a choked murmur he said:

“Malcolm Atherton. Good sir, there is something evil gnawing at my heart.”

I was visibly taken aback, never had I heard uttered words like these from a patient. Many I have dealt with have not been lucid but this man seemed to be in a realm beyond lucidity and psychosis. He remained in a state between death and life, clung to by whatever malcontented plague had found him.

“What evil?” I hurriedly asked.
“It must be removed! It must be removed!” He shouted, his voice howling in torment. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and his breath mounted to a galloping pace when suddenly his body shuddered as if a light had been quenched from within. He began to convulse on the table, his body losing all semblance of control. And then as fast as it had overcome him it stopped. He became still, his breath less rapid and his heartbeat less quickened. He remained lying unconscious but visibly alive and seemingly freed momentarily of the earlier distress.

The patient remained comatose while the police arrived. To my surprise Malcolm Atherton was well known to them by reputation. I was informed that he was born on July 6th 1865 in Providence. For a time he was greatly ambitious and interested in the exploration of the unknown world. Archeology was his profession, dealing in the forgotten sarcophagi of the Egyptian pharaohs. Atherton had recently returned from an ill-fated expedition to the tomb of Sekhemkhet II or Sekhemkhet the Great, as he is called his admirers to claim the jewels said to be stored in his sepulchre. Funded by the Egyptology wing of the American Museum of Natural History, Atherton left with twenty companions and had returned with a mere eight. Nile Virus was the probable cause of these numerous deaths but the survivors suspected their comrades had been felled by forces unknown to all manner of natural law. I have since read over Atherton’s notes and concluded that articulating the precise moment of infestation would be futile and impossible. The origin of this ailment is so unknown and malignant that I cannot with clear conscience provide my own impoverished theories.

In sincerity, the truth is so foul and wicked that men of my profession would quail at its revelation, seeing it shake the foundations of all known medical inquiry. All I can in exact certainty relate is the following: On a dark North African night our patient was exploring the southern end of the Pharaoh’s tomb when he came upon a sunken statuette embedded in the center wall of the crypts’ treasure chamber. It seemed to be a carven idol whose depiction was unlike anything known to even the most erudite Egyptologists. In no way did it resemble any of the known deities of the Nile or Nubia and for a time Atherton believed he had stumbled upon a secret religion whose very existence was unknown to all form of scholarly academics.  The hieroglyphic markings were utterly foreign and the image was as hideous as it was ominously foreboding. But Atherton in his foolishness ignored the obvious malevolence of the idol and secreting it in his luggage, brought it back to New York.

Atherton was in my care by an accident of fate and it was rendered necessary that I research the field of otherworldly illnesses to make a full diagnosis. I had no means or experience in dealing with dark arts or devilry so I found it profoundly peculiar to be suggesting remedies that healed men felled by influenza, dysentery and other crippling maladies. I needed to approach this convalescing person from a foreign angle but at this point none had occurred to me. I attributed my failure to the obvious factor that my expertise in demonic expulsion was entirely lacking. His disease, I feared would not cease even at death, for by this moment I admitted that something strange lurked within the confines of Atherton’s heart, working and gnawing away, leaving his carcass a castle for an infested mind. It was my duty to spare him, as it is the duty of all well-meaning physicians, but this state of discomfort had surpassed all my medical mastery. It was time to resort to a method, suspect in origin, but entirely useful to these proceedings.

Mesmerism and hypnosis were the tactics I began to wield though they at first yielded no promising affect. He seemed to be trapped in an absolute stronghold of impenetrable conflict that could be pierced by no medical means. Finally, after multiple trials I became entirely discouraged and demoralized. I have in my possession a golden watch entrusted down from the generations for quaint solidarity and I thought it wise to use the object on Atherton in the faint hope it would expedite his healing. I dangled my golden timepiece in front of his glazed eyes and cast him into a state of vulnerable oblivion and yet his reticence was astounding. My queries were all together ignored or challenged, for I knew it was not Atherton I was speaking with. No answer was forthcoming. I knew I had to fracture the curse but then a revelation dawned on me with unnatural force: I would need to conduct open dialogue with the demon’s voice itself, not the ventriloquized frame of Atherton’s body. Instead of addressing him I would need to address the infestation and coax it out of its abode.

At this time he had been in my care for two weeks with no alteration of his condition. Several doctors were brought to my side, but neither could they shed insight on the dilemma. At this juncture I was unaware that my first headway would occur at the beginning of the third week. Once more I dangled the timepiece in front of Atherton’s dulled eyes and waited. As usual I asked him the main questions:

“What is your name?”

“Malcolm Atherton”

“When were your born?”

“July 6th 1865”

“Where were you born?” At this a wind seemed to gust above his bedside and a monstrously calamitous voiced echoed from the confines of his throat.

“Outside of my mother’s womb, you bilge rat!”

I jolted back from my position by the bedside. My thoughts flooded with a sense of wonderment and also profound perturbation. I had succeeded in splintering the icy walls that surrounded my patient. Regaining my composure I continued my interrogation with a calculating mind.

“What is afflicting you, Mr. Atherton?”

“He isn’t afflicted by any abnormality, Doctor Turner, he is merely sharing his blessed heart with me. Would you care to speak to Malcolm? I can call him for you,” the demon cackled with delight. Atherton’s tongue was moved obviously by an inner conductor, one of extreme depravity.

“No I don’t want to speak with him. I would prefer to discuss this situation with you. If we are to converse, may I know your name.” I said, my designs currently unfelt by the demon.

“I am as nameless as the mountains,” he said paradoxically as Atherton’s head rose from the pillow.

“Why do you inhabit this man?”

“He trod where it was sacred, where the paths of men should be hindered from desecration.”

“What do you gain from holding him enthralled?” I was entirely wrought by a sense of disbelief.

“The inhabiting of bodies is how I will pass to the next world.” This pronouncement shattered my weakened standing. An afterlife seemed as implausible as it was unwelcome and yet here was an extraordinary moment of revelation in that matter. The following occurrence I have never articulately spoken to an intelligent soul: The strain on Atherton’s weakened heart had become such a costly hindrance that it caused the emaciated organ to halt altogether. His eyes were enameled with hinted gray and a groan of pure, ghastly termination exuded from his mouth.  A gasp of pure, primordial wretchedness erupted from him and in the instant that it began his body shook with ferocious abandon. His veins flared from his arms as a slight hissing was heard escaping from all the pores of his skin. He seemed to shrink with fantastic disillusionment, his eyes widened in disbelief as the demon acknowledged his good fortune. Every crevice of Atherton’s anatomy was shrunken and scourged from within, broken down and decomposed at a speed no human could endure.

Atherton had withered to a frame so diminished that his skin barely stretched over his protuberant bones. He was a skeleton taking on the very façade of death, a death so remarkable that at that moment he looked entirely like a statue of paralyzed fear. This situation had left my medical expertise behind; I had failed in an incredible fashion. He was trapped in a state between slumber and the finality of eternal rest, caught inside the will of a diabolical plague. He remained bound to the bed in this unresolved state without any alterations in his condition. I had invariably hastened his demise without any hope of remedy. In a matter of moments all that remained of my former patient was eradicated. What was left of Atherton vibrated with alarming strain and then in the blink of my tired eyes receded into complete oblivion. His bones and tissue had dissolved into a fine white powder splayed across the hospital cot. All that remained was this bleached pumice-like dust and the remnants of the patient’s tattered garb.

The demon seemed to have transcended his shackles and achieved whatever unworldly purpose he had wished. Atherton was gone, reduced to a collection of inhuman dust and I was left cowering in the wreckage of my impoverished sanity. My days are forever marred by this affair and I doubt anyone of respectable clinical standing shall believe what I have retold in this account. I would not have accepted these claims had I been divorced from the circumstances. But they occurred, and I will testify despite every moment of disbelief from you dear reader, that they certainly occurred. Atherton is surely dead and his demonic apparition has fled to another new world.

10

Joel C. Turner, May 26, 1951-Dec. 8, 2009

On this anniversary of what would have been my late brother Joel’s 61st birthday, my sister Pamela and I remember him with all the force of memory and familial affection, as well as our departed parents, Earl and Sylvia. On May 4, 1978, the five us founded Undercover Books, the bookstore that would give all three of us siblings our adult careers. For those who didn’t know Joel–or who did and want to be reminded of his personality and accomplishments, which included a run for Congress in 2000 and earlier being among the very first online booksellers, several years before Amazon.com–you may read an obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the remembrance I wrote that was excerpted in Shelf Awareness and Bookweb. The entire piece is pasted in below, set in the Comic Sans font to which Joel was partial (for readers able to view it that way) along with photos of him.
—-

December 9, 2009

Dear Friends and Colleagues,



It was with great regret and sadness that we write to inform you of the recent, sudden passing of our dear brother, Joel C. Turner, 58 years old. 


Many of you will recall that we three siblings together opened Undercover Books, in Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1978, on May 4 of that year, with the hard-working assistance of our parents, Earl (deceased, 1992) and Sylvia (deceased, 2006). From the original location at Van Aken Shopping Center, our family-run independent chain grew to occupy a location in the historic Old Arcade of downtown Cleveland, and a shop that also featured the sale of record albums and the then-new format of CD-ROMs, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Joel’s role in the bookstores’ success and the good reputation we enjoyed in the book world was vital and indispensable. He was always generating exciting new ideas that drove our growth. Joel was a constant reader, a passionate believer in books and the power of the printed word. He derived tremendous satisfaction from selling books to the devoted readers whose trade we cultivated in our bookstores. 

We were fortunate to open our business at a moment when throughout the country and particularly the midwest, much book retailing was migrating from older downtowns to suburban locales, as the book departments of long-established department stores and old-line independents gave way to new indies like us. Soon, we were being regularly called upon by publishers’ sales reps from all parts of the industry, as Undercover Books became a go-to store for houses eager to break out books on the national scene. Notable authors who launched books at our stores included Mark Helprin (“Winter’s Tale”), Richard North Patterson (“The Lasko Tangent”), and Walter Tevis (“Queen’s Gambit”).  

The stores, indeed the Turner family home, helmed by Sylvia’s extraordinary cooking and hospitality and Earl’s gregarious nature, and Joel’s energetic raconteurship, also became a favorite stop for sales reps and authors.



By the early 1990s, competitive and economic pressures had mounted, and Joel had the vision to reduce the brick & mortar concentration of our enterprise and transform it into an operation that served businesses, corporate libraries, schools, and public institutions. As this shift occurred, the name of the business became Undercover Book Service, which soon also had an online presence, surely one of the first online booksellers. He also developed a sideline in the antiquarian and second-hand side of the trade. Joel was a true bookseller, and also served the book industry through active participation as an officer and board member of the American Booksellers Association.  



In this decade, he and Sylvia moved to a lovely part of North Carolina, where he helped her live very comfortably for the remaining years of her life. After Sylvia’s death, he built for himself a beautiful home on a scenic mountaintop in the town of Bostic,  Rutherford County, North Carolina, where he died in his sleep this past weekend.  In addition to the two of us–his younger brother and older sister–Joel is survived by nephew and niece Benjamin and Emma Taylor; nephew Ewan Gallup Turner; brother-in law Ev Taylor; sister-in-law Kyle Gallup; cousins Stephanie Shiff Cooper and Brian Shiff; and Uncle Myer Shiff and Aunt Linda Shiff. 



Plans for memorializing Joel are being considered as we write this to you. For those wishing to mark Joel’s life with a charitable donation we urge you to make contributions to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE,  http://www.abffe.com/) or for medical research in search of a cure for diabetes.  

We write in sadness, but with fondness and appreciation for all the years that we three Turner siblings and our parents were recipients of your generous affection, respect, and consideration.  The bookstores gave all of us, and especially Joel, great enjoyment and satisfaction, along with so many wonderful friends. Feel free to send this message on to any of your contacts in the book world. 

Sincerely, 

Philip Turner (philipsturner@gmail.com) and Pamela Turner (pturnertaylor@roadrunner.com)

// more. . . Please click through to the full post to see all photos.

 

11

About Philip Turner–Professional Background

Finding a Foothold in New York City This page of personal recollections of my path into publishing picks up where Philip Turner–Personal History ended, a web page complimentary to this one, about my years running Undercover Books with my family in Cleveland; from age sixteen attending two experimental educational institutions, the School on Magnolia, for […]

12

In Conversation w/Canadian Author Ken McGoogan at The Explorer’s Club in NYC

In the early 2000s, when I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers, I had the good fortune to acquire the US publishing rights to a book first published in Canada, Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Who Time Forgot and Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean, what would prove to be only the first two books on polar exploration by Ken McGoogan, who has continued to immerse himself in the subject over the past twenty years, now having published a total of six Arctic books. A key development in that immersion has been his role as a resource historian for many sailings with Adventure Canada, a travel company that takes visitors on voyages to Canada’s northern reaches and in to the Arctic itself.

Fatal Passage chronicled the mystery of the ships HMS Terror and Erebus, which under the command of Royal Navy captain John Franklin, set off with more than 125 officers and crew on board in search of the Northwest Passage, but then disappeared never to be heard from again, at least not among Euro-centric people. Many search parties sought to learn the fate of Franklin and his men, including one helmed by John Rae, from Orkney in northern Scotland. He was the first European-based explorer to value highly the local knowledge of Inuit guides, hunters, and interpreters, who led him to eyewitnesses who’d seen hungry white seamen trekking across their lands in dire straits. They reported to Rae their understanding that to them these desperate men had engaged in cannibalism, feeding on the dead to try and save themselves. Rae’s discovery, though vetted by him with careful cross-questioning of the native witnesses, earned him a vituperative rebuke once back in England from Franklin’s wife, Jane Lady Franklin, who even enlisted Charles Dickens to editorialize against Rae. Fatal Passage effectively rehabilitated the reputation of John Rae, more than a century after it had been trashed by poobahs in Victorian England.

When it was published in the US, in 2002, the book won a Christopher Award, given to authors who produce works that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” McGoogan traveled from his home in Toronto to New York for the ceremony, and we began to get better acquainted as author and publisher, and as friends. Later, I made a road trip with my wife and son to Toronto and we enjoyed a dinner at Ken’s home with him and his artist wife Sheena. Another guest that night was Ken’s literary agent Beverley Slopen, from whom I’d acquired the rights to Ken’s books, and from whom I would later acquire rights to books by other Canadian authors, such as the mystery master Howard Engel, creator of the Benny Cooperman detective series.

Last December, Ken got in touch with me to extend an invitation. His latest book, Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery, was published in Canada last fall, and he explained to me it would be coming out in the US in the Spring of 2024. He would be coming down to New York to make a presentation on March 22 at the NY Public Library, in connection with a new exhibit, “The Awe of the Arctic” in the historic main library from March 15-July 13. A day prior to that, Ken said, he would be giving a talk at another public venue. He asked, in so many words, “Would you be interested in reading the new book, preparing some questions, and interviewing me at the first event?” After learning a few more details, including the fact there would be an honorarium to cover my preparation and for serving as his interlocutor, I readily accepted the exciting invitation.

In January, I was even more excited to learn from Ken that the venue for our joint event would be The Explorer’s Club, a venerable institution on the east side of Manhattan established in 1904. On Honourary Canadian, the sister website to this one, I put up a post promoting our talk, chronicling my longtime association with Canada and Canadian authors, and drafted what I dubbed my Canadian-adjacent bio, touching on my longtime immersion in #CANLit and in reading and publishing tales of polar exploration.

From Ken’s publisher—Douglas & McIntyre of Madeira Park, British Columbia, Canada—I received a copy of Searching for Franklin, and dove right into it. Rather than immediately noting possible questions for Ken while reading the book, I instead read it with a pencil in hand, scratching out asterisks in the margins next to passages that intrigued me, which I anticipated going back to once I’d finished the whole book, to mine them for the most resonant themes and to form the most stimulating questions I could think of for our discussion.

I found the book quite engrossing, and appreciated that it was written in multiple, contrasting styles of narrative nonfiction, though it’s all done without becoming jarring or off-putting. While most of is written in past tense, the norm for this sort of book prose, there are occasional passages in present tense, as when Ken and his fellow adventurers were actually touring the Arctic on an Adventure Canada cruise, and when they disembarked from the ship to traverse the ground where Franklin, his officers and crew, and their Inuit hunters, interpreters, and guides had trekked almost two centuries ago. Ken also presents some fascinating counter-factual possibilities that contrast with the known historical record, as he offers his best theory about what led to the tragic demise of Franklin and his two ships and the entire crew. Note with no spoiler: this new theory of his, appearing for the first time in Searching for Franklin is supported by medical reporting and highly informed speculation.

Last Thursday, the night of our discussion finally arrived. I was glad to be joined by my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, and my adult son Ewan Turner, who operates Philip Turner Book Productions with me; he is a creative writer publishing under the pen name M.G. Turner. After a friendly reception in the historic rooms of The Explorer’s Club, Ken McGoogan pulled on the rope that sounds the Club’s bell, calling the meeting to order, and an audience of what looked to be about seventy-five people took seats in the main hall. Following an introduction by Cedar Swan, the CEO of Adventure Canada, Ken gave a talk outlining his long association with the Franklin saga, going all the way back to the writing of Fatal Passage. Using slides, he described how Margaret Atwood had introduced him to Swan’s father Matthew, the founder of Adventure Canada; the many voyages he’s made with them over the past twenty years; how Franklin’s candidacy to lead the search for the Northwest Passage had been championed to the Royal Navy by Lady Franklin, even though his earlier expeditions had produced less than stellar results; John Rae’s discovery of Franklin’s fate; and the medical and dietary travails that he now believes led to the demise of so many of Franklin’s men. When he finished his presentation, it was time for our discussion.

I began, asking such questions as these (with appendices from my research in parentheses):

  • Why did the idea of the Northwest Passage become so central to British myth-making about itself, and later to Canada’s own self-image? (In a discussion a day earlier when we met for a convivial dinner and to discuss the following night’s program, I referred Ken to such evidence of the rousing example from pop culture of Stan Rogers’ song “Northwest Passage,” a veritable Canadian national anthem, sung lustily by the barrel-chested musician (1949-83) on his debut album in 1981. So as to not lengthen the duration of our discussion unduly, I refrained from mentioning it then, but do so now for the sake of sharing more of my research.)
  • How was it that young boys went to sea so young, including Franklin himself, at age twelve? (In another example from cultural history cited in camera to Ken, but not at the Club is the haunting folk song “The Captain’s Apprentice,” collected in 1905 by my favorite English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose lyrics tell the sad tale of a boy treated roughly.)
  • Can you contrast the leadership styles of John Rae and Franklin, with Rae seeming to show special regard for the well-being of his fellow expeditioneers, more so than Franklin?
  • It’s amazing to me, as you write, that ships had libraries—1700 volumes on Franklin’s ship, which would have taken up a lot of room on board. Aboard ship, where living and sleeping quarters were notoriously tight, how did they accommodate so many books? (And, was there such a thing as a ship librarian? That would be the job for me.)
  • You write that Charles Dickens at least allowed John Rae to publish a rebuttal to Lady Franklin’s accusations about him, but I wonder: Why did Dickens believe Lady Franklin’s slanders about Rae, at all?
  • Can you explain why when Erebus and Terror were found in 2014 and 2016, they were forty miles apart in the Arctic Ocean?
  • The caloric demand for portagers and voyageurs while doing all the enormously strenuous work on the trail must have been very high for them—while they carried 80-pound packs, in contrast to the sailors who carried a fourth of that weight—yet they often didn’t get the food they needed. How did they manage?

The discussion between the two of us transitioned into questions from members of the audience, with me calling on seven or eight people to stand and ask their questions, which were good ones. I enjoyed this part of the program very much, taking me back to my days when I moderated the community meeting of my college, Franconia College. After about an hour and twenty minutes, we concluded what had been a very enjoyable and stimulating program. The Explorer’s Club has posted it on their youtube page, so if of interest, you may view it via the link below.

I will conclude this post by making one more observation that I didn’t take the time to say last Thursday night. As my author Ruth Gruber (1911-2016)—about whom I’ve written often on this website—who I’ve observed with her spot reporting during and after WWII, and in such books as Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation, became, in my opinion, the most prominent chronicler of DPs (displaced persons) following the war, Ken McGoogan has over the course of his six books on the Arctic become our foremost chronicler of the explorers who sailed across the Atlantic seeking navigable waterways spanning northern seas that would take them all the way to “Cathay”—a Pierre Berton for the twenty-first century. I’m glad I’ve been in a position to carry on a dialogue with Ken these past many years.

https://www.youtube.com/live/450ZwrJor5U?si=QOE_hO59YB89Z2Xf

And here is a gallery of photos from the whole night, from the reception through Ken’s talk, and then from our discussion. All photos taken by Kyle Gallup.

[gallery link="file" ids="18452,18453,18454,18455,18456,18457,18458,18459,18460,18461,18462,18463,18464,18465,18466,18467"]

 

 

 

13

A Dispatch From the End of January

[caption id="attachment_18365" align="alignleft" width="192"] Bookcase in my home office[/caption]

I established my company, Philip Turner Book Productions, in January 2009, fifteen years ago this month. It was the nadir of the Great Recession, only weeks after I’d been laid off in a big publisher’s downsizing; it turned out to be the last corporate house I would work for, an experience I wrote about in 2012. With that founding period in mind, I like to use the first month of each new year to take stock of the annum just ended, and try to set a course for the new one. In 2020, my adult son Ewan Turner began working in the business with me, and we had lots of new activity, so I had occasion to write full-length summaries of 2021 and 2022 which I published on this website and shared in my social networks.

This year, however, I’ve reached the end of  January without having prepared a similar summary. I just haven’t been inclined to go through the strenuous effort of a full-form look-back at 2023, not with the future rushing in. And the new year in business has gotten off a flying start, so I’ve had little time to blog. In addition to new work quickly cropping up, I’ve undertaken an interesting assignment. I’m serving as a juror for the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards, sponsored by the Columbia Graduate Journalism School. Our shortlists will be announced in late February, and a public event for finalists and awardees will be held later, in the spring. At the moment, I’m reading intensively back and forth among approximately 100 projects that are candidates for recognition. The Lukas Prize has three categories, all in nonfiction, as you can see on their website. It’s a very rewarding experience so far, and I’m enjoying working with some new colleagues.

I’ll close this post by sharing the covers of current books by authors we represent in the literary agency portion of our business, either recently published, or soon to be out in 2024. Ewan and I are hoping to do more good work this year.

[gallery link="file" ids="18148,18353,18354,18367,18380,18355"]

 

14

Excited to Receive My Copy of “AMONG FRIENDS: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing in the 20th Century”

The Story Behind a Handsome New Book on Books

One bright spot during the dark first year of COVID came on October 10, 2020, almost three years ago. I was invited by Buz Teacher to write an essay for a book he was assembling, an oral history of bookselling and publishing in the last century. Buz had asked my publishing friend Mildred Marmur for a contribution to the forthcoming book and she advised him to ask me, too. Given that I’d been writing about writing about both subjects for more than a decade it didn’t take me long say yes.

Fortunately, I had about six months before I would have to deliver my essay. As is my wont when I have a writing assignment that I’m obliged to deliver—this is true for  writing pitch letters as an agent, or when I was an in-house editor in publishing companies and I had dust jacket copy and catalog copy to write—I fretted about it for some time without actually writing anything. I couldn’t think how I might start it. Eventually I did quit procrastinating and found a place to begin.

I handed the essay in, in June 2021, under the title “The Education of a Bookselling Editor,” clocking in at approximately 4100 words. I welcomed the opportunity to write longer than usual; personal essays on this site, like one I published here—about working with William Styron on an Introduction he wrote for Dead Run, a nonfiction narrative I edited about an innocent man on Death Row—tend to less than 2500 words.

I also handed into Buz, and his co-editor, his wife Janet Bukovinsky Teacher, about half a dozen photos and illustrations from Undercover Books, the bookstores I ran with my siblings and our parents at the start of my career,  and from some of the titles I’ve brought out as editor, which they said they hoped to use as they laid the book out. For more than two years, I’ve been wondering which ones they might use. Much time passed, but Buz kept in touch, and I had faith that the design and production of the book, and all that was necessary to make what would ultimately be a 576-page tome—the impressive volume is 9 inches wide, 11 inches tall, with a 3-inch thick spine, and weighs about nine pounds, with dozens of photos and illustrations and essays by more than 100 contributors (many of whom are bookpeople I know)—was well in hand. My confidence wasn’t misplaced—after all, Buz and his late brother Lawrence had co-founded the indie publisher Running Press back in the day.

Contributors were not being offered money as payment, but Buz promised us all a finished copy of the book, which I’m thrilled to say arrived today. This is the book’s website, where there’s a two-minute video trailer. The official publication date is in two days, September 23rd. They edited my piece lightly**, and split it into into two sections; one, headed Independent Booksellers: All in the Family, is devoted to my years as a bookseller with Undercover Books, the bookstore I founded and ran in Cleveland from 1978-85 with my siblings Joel and Pamela, and our parents, Sylvia and Earl; the second, called Literary Independents: Making a Difference, covers roughly my first two decades as an in-house editor and publisher.

As the book copy puts it,

In lively personal essays about the people, companies, and books that helped shape our culture, more than 100 prominent figures and publishing and bookselling recall their careers during a time of extraordinary growth, from the postwar period through the revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s to the new millennium. Illustrated with original photography of vintage book jackets, period graphics form Publishers Weekly and archival photos, Among Friends reveals how the book industry both reflected and responded to societal changes. This deluxe limited edition pays homage to the creative and entrepreneurial spirt of that time.”

If you’re a bibliophile or if you have a book collector on your holiday gift list, I suggest you consider buying this very special book for them. They only printed around 1600 copies, so if this is a book for you, or someone you love, I suggest you not wait to buy it, because it could sell out, and the price of it in future resale is in my opinion likely to rise in years to come beyond it’s published list price of $200.

Below is the complete essay I wrote in 2021, and below it are photos of the handsome book and the hinged box and my contributions to it. It is really a stunning book.

The Education of a Bookselling Editor

Founding Undercover Books

In 1977, while finishing my last year as an undergraduate at Franconia College, an experimental institution in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I had intended with my bachelor’s degree in history of religion and philosophy of education, to seek a professional niche for myself promoting interfaith dialogue among Jews and gentiles. I hoped to work for an organization with a mission to combat bigotry, anti-Semitism, injustice, and intolerance. After returning to Cleveland, my hometown, I began looking in this direction, but quickly learned that, lacking an advanced degree, I was unlikely to have a chance of getting anywhere in the field. What’s more, as an émigré from traditional education—I had also attended an alternative high school, my first happy immersion in the educational ferment of the times—graduate school was the last thing I wanted to do! I may have only known it inchoately, but I sought a field in which my nontraditional education and interests would not hold me back, and might even propel me forward.

At roughly the same time, my elder siblings, out in the work world longer than I, were already plotting exits of their own from any chance they’d be relegated to humdrum working lives.

Pamela, the eldest of us three, had worked in Cleveland’s grand department stores, which had bustling book departments, and middle sibling Joel (d. 2009) had worked at Kay’s Bookstore, in downtown Cleveland, a venerable book emporium whose truculent owner Rachel Kowan kept her employees on their toes by challenging them to answer exactly where certain titles in the rambling three-floor store were shelved, along with other tests of arcane bookselling knowledge, such as which edition of Goethe’s Faust contained Parts I and II of the frequently abridged work.

Pam and Joel’s smart idea was to open, with our book-loving parents Earl and Sylvia, a new bookstore in Shaker Heights, the suburb where we’d grown up. I quickly tossed my lot in with them, at least to get the store opened, then soon found myself more involved and engaged by bookselling and the book business than I’d anticipated. We chose the name Undercover Books—invoking our passion for reading under the covers as kids, and for mystery fiction—and on May 4, 1978 opened the first of what would ultimately be three locations.

In this collection of essays about bookselling and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century, it is noteworthy that Undercover Books joined the wave of a building trend in the 1970s-80s in which retail bookselling was migrating from department stores and big downtown bookstores to indie bookstores in the suburbs of a number of cities—Pittsburgh, Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis, Kansas City, as well as in our own downtown, where many local readers had long shopped at Publix Book Mart, run for decades by the eminent Anne and Bob Levine. However, suburbanites with readerly interests not inclined to visit downtown were under-booked, it could be said.

The space we leased in an outdoor strip shopping center—deliberately not an indoor mall—had formerly housed a shoe store where we’d shopped as kids, and was large at 2700 square feet, but the shape itself was that of a shoebox, and could’ve made for a very dull bookstore layout. Smartly though, a store designer showed us how to address this problem: beyond the front section of the store, where the cash counter and walls of bookcases displaying lots of frontlist fiction and nonfiction were displayed face-out, we could cut into the rectangular space with wooden bookcases built at 30-degree angles, lending an intimate, library-like feel to the store. With that, the Travel, Reference, Literature, Poetry, Art & Photography, Children’s, Health & Parenting, and Cookbook sections became their own quiet spaces. The opening of this attractively designed bookstore, in a suburb with a well-educated populace that had never had a bookstore within its city limits, quickly attracted the trade and appreciation of lots and lots of people locally and in the city more widely.

I enjoyed working on in-store displays, and grew adept at fashioning arrangements of books that encouraged browsers to make connections among titles, subjects, authors, and ideas, while also managing to shelve the greatest number of titles possible in finite spaces. As adult book buyer, I ordered books that led to annual sales exceeding $1,000,000, at a time when that level of sales was not common among independent bookstores. Regularly called upon by sales reps, and pitched specific titles by sales management, Undercover Books became a go-to store for publishers eager to break out books nationally. Notable fiction writers who launched books with us included Mark Helprin (A Dove of the East, and Other Stories, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press), Richard North Patterson (The Lasko Tangent, W.W. Norton), and Walter Tevis (Queen’s Gambit, Random House). We also held salon-like evenings, as when George Gibson of David R. Godine, Publisher, discussed the Godine list and fine printing with our customers.

We’d look for books we had already read and enjoyed, new or backlist, on which we would take aggressive ordering positions, then sell 300-400 copies of these titles in a two- or three-month stretch. This happened with Simon & Schuster’s trade paperback reissue of Jack Finney’s classic time travel novel Time & Again, as it did with the travelogue Blue Highways, when author William Least Moon was brought in by our Little, Brown rep to meet us and sign stacks of the hardcover we had ordered. Our parents were also avid readers, Sylvia of commercial fiction and cookbooks, Earl of biography, sports and business, and their enthusiasms meant our in-store selection appealed to a wide age range of readers. Our parents also opened their home for meals and convivial time with sales reps and authors.

Cleveland was the home of many Fortune 500 companies, and most had corporate libraries in their home offices, where professional books were often required, likewise true of partners in remote offices who also needed books for their work. We worked with staff librarians who got requests for books for the home office and from distant branches, all of which business we’d fulfill. We made rapid delivery of special orders and prompt service on bulk orders of business books, reference titles, and professional manuals a priority. Innovations we made in book ordering and inventory management, in conjunction with book industry expert Leonard Shatzkin and his son Mike, a publishing consultant, made Undercover Books the subject of a chapter in Leonard’s diagnosis of the book business, In Cold Type: Overcoming the Book Crisis (Houghton Mifflin, 1982) and of articles in Publishers Weekly.

In this period, Joel became a board member of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), which gave us a voice in independent bookselling’s response to the growing influence of corporate chain bookselling. Able to start a conversation with just about anyone, Joel enjoyed public organizing and in 2000 ran for the House of Representatives in Ohio’s 11th congressional district. That same year, Pamela was hired by Overdrive, an early distributor of ebooks. With responsibility to uphold copyright, publishers wanted assurance that their titles would be secure on the emerging platforms. As director of content, she worked to gain the confidence of sales and marketing departments, holding that position till 2004, a key period in the digital transition.

During my time in bookselling I read avidly in all genres of fiction, especially many detective series and spy fiction, enjoying and recommending books by George Chesbro, James Crumley, Earl W. Emerson, Dorothy Hughes, Margaret Millar, Russell Greenan, John Le Carré, Tony Hillerman, Ross Macdonald and John D. Macdonald. We also had great clientele for new literary fiction, selling many copies of books by Robert Stone, Brian Moore, Peter De Vries, Anne Tyler, Barbara Pym, Margery Sharp, Margaret Atwood, Laurie Colwin, Howard Frank Mosher, Ernest Hebert, and Susan Richards Shreve.

It should be noted too that we opened just as a new generation of Canadian authors was bursting in to print, and I had an instant affinity for Canadian literature. Though trade rules at the time discouraged importation of Canadian titles, I found a way to work around them. Seal Books was Bantam Books’ Canadian division; their titles resided ostensibly off-limits to us on an out-of-the-way corner of the Bantam order form. Our Bantam rep instructed me if I ordered any Seal Books titles the order wouldn’t be filled, but I penciled in some quantities to see what would happen, and they were shipped to us! We began introducing our customers to books by Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence, Marian Engel, Antonine Maillet, Alice Munro, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Timothy Findley, Farley Mowat, Pierre Berton, the longtime CBC broadcaster Patrick Watson, who visited our store to launch his suspense novel, Alter Ego (Viking, 1979), and Robertson Davies.

We were ordering Davies’ Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, Manticore, World of Wonders) by the carton from Penguin, stacking them up and selling them in large quantities. In my enthusiasm, I wrote Davies a letter c/o of Penguin to explain this and let him know about our stores. A pleasant correspondence ensued between us, his letters from which are reproduced in facsimile form here.

In 1982 Davies’ editor at Viking, Elisabeth Sifton, invited me to write a letter to U.S. booksellers extolling his work and pitching them on his new novel, The Rebel Angels, which became the Canadian author’s first U.S. hardcover bestseller.

The bookstore was graduate school for me. After seven years, I felt the proverbial itch and decided I’d like to try working in publishing, preferably as an editor. I was keen to originate books, not just sell them as finished products, and with the bookstore experience, I was hopeful I could get a job and do meaningful work. In 1985, I embarked for New York City and bearing in mind E.B. White’s observation in his essay “Here is New York” that, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky,” I found an apartment in Washington Heights, the hilliest section of Manhattan with its bike-able hills and steep stairways, and the dramatic George Washington Bridge in view from many vantage points, endowing me with a fondness for bridges that lasts to this day as evidenced by the name of my book-focused blog, The Great Gray Bridge, an homage to the 1942 childrens classic The Little Red Lighthouse and The Great Gray Bridge.
Following my departure from Cleveland, the family continued operating from the original location, and then in 1992, to capitalize on the strong B2B elements in the business, Joel re-envisioned the business as Undercover Book Service, supplying books to individuals and corporations all over the country and abroad. With the emergence of the Internet in 1993, the family transformed the stores into an online book-ordering service powered by a website they created some months before Amazon got underway.

Turning 7 Years of Bookstore Experience into a Publishing Career 

One of the first publishing houses I applied to was Charles Scribner’s Sons, as the firm now called Scribner was then known. A contributor to this volume, Mildred Marmur, was its president then, the first female head of a major house. Though we’d never met, she saw me in her office. Intrigued by my background, she explained she had nothing full-time to offer me, but added that the company was sponsoring a first novel contest named after Maxwell Perkins, the legendary Scribner editor who’d nurtured the talents of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and James Jones. She asked if I’d want to work as the contest’s first reader. I told her that at Undercover Books we’d sold A. Scott Berg’s biography, Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius (Dutton, 1978), so would be pleased with the opportunity to tap into Perkins’ literary legacy.

More recently, it must be said that as I’ve been preparing this essay for print, I’ve learned about a different legacy of Perkins’ that does not shine favorably on him or Scribner: his shameful elevation of eugenics through their book list, a revelation from author Daniel Okrent that has led to an overdue re-assessment of the Scribner editor’s reputation by many, including the editor of Penguin Random House’s One World book imprint, Chris Jackson, the 2020 recipient of an award formerly given in Perkins’ name. To me, this shows that our business should never be satisfied with its past, but in concert with the wider society, must always work toward a better future for all.

Working three days per week in what ended up as a two-month stint in the winter of 1986, I ensconced myself in Scribner’s conference room with unopened jiffy bags and manuscripts stacked up around me like so much drying cordwood. Think John Updike’s classic sketch “Invasion of the Book Envelopes.” My assignment was to unpack the mailers and read between 5-50 pages of each manuscript of what turned out to be more than 700 contest entries. I also filled out a brief questionnaire, signaling a thumbs-down or -up for a second reading by senior editors. Coincidentally, I recommended seventy entries, or almost exactly 10%, for second readings. There was one entry I really loved, by an E.M. Hunnicutt, which I read avidly beyond the allotted limit. My recommendation of it was more enthusiastic than for any other candidate, but before I’d finished plowing through all the entries, I saw that it wasn’t going to win the prize. I noted the author’s phone number and address and photocopied the manuscript, hoping I might contact “Hunnicutt” soon, once I was hired somewhere as a full-fledged editor.

My good luck held and soon, after a reference from literary agent Ruth Nathan (wife of longtime Publishers Weekly subsidiary rights reporter Paul Nathan), I was offered a job as an acquiring editor at Walker & Company, a somewhat sleepy publisher of young adult non-fiction and genre adult fiction (Westerns, mysteries, Regency romances, etc.), published mostly for libraries. Walker had terraced offices with scenic views twelve storeys above Fifth Avenue at 56th Street; on St. Patrick’s Day the company threw parties as the annual parade streamed past below, attended by house authors such as Isaac Asimov. I was assigned the genre that founder and publisher Sam Walker called “men’s adventure”–thrillers, swashbucklers, seafaring novels, spy books, a genre I still enjoy. Walker had in its early years published books by John Le Carré and Flann O’Brien, so I was hopeful that my mandate might extend to other areas of publishing, even literary fiction. My first week at Walker I called E.M. Hunnicutt—whose initials made me think of E.M. Forster—and learned that E.M.’s first name was “Ellen.” She explained that because she sold many stories to Boys’ Life, the magazine of Boy Scouts of America, she’d long used the initials to disguise her gender,

Ellen and I hit it off beautifully and for an advance of $750 I acquired rights to her novel, the first novel I line-edited. Our relationship established a high benchmark in my relationships with authors that I’ve always sought out since. Ellen and I engaged in a vigorous dialogue about her work and its dominant theme—the creative purposes to which suffering and mourning may be put. The protagonist of the novel was Ada Cunningham a young teenage girl and musical prodigy who’d fled a destructive custody battle that engulfed her family in the wake of her mother’s death. She narrates her story from a safe haven she’s found with a circus troupe that’s wintering over in a quiet Florida camp where she finds solace in composing a requiem for her late mom on the troupe’s calliope.

When Suite for Calliope: A Novel of Music and the Circus, was published in the spring of 1987, it received a starred review in Kirkus, Dell bought paperback rights, and Walker sold out its hardcover first printing. The starred Kirkus happened to land on my desk on May 4, long a fateful date on my personal calendar for the opening of Undercover Books and other milestones. I phoned Ellen to give her the good news and read the review to her, learning only then that that day was her birthday. Suffice it to say, it was one of the happiest birthday calls I’ve ever made. Ellen’s run of good fortune wasn’t finished yet: Before her novel went to the printer, she learned that for her short fiction she’d won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. This was an award associated with the literary journal Antaeus, which editor Daniel Halpern co-founded with Paul Bowles, a laurel we were able to print on the book jacket; the senior judge of the Heinz Prize that year was Nadine Gordimer. Her winning collection, In the Music Library, was also published in 1987, by Pittsburgh University Press. Quite a year for Ellen. Working with her was a great privilege and cemented my ardent interest in modern nomads and circus stories.

I’ll add that Ellen Hunnicutt’s novel played a role in cementing my relationship with my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, whom I would meet and marry in 1990-91, only a few years after the novel had come out.

Another novelist of Ellen’s period, Mark Dintenfass, praised her novel in a blurb he gave me for the jacket, commenting that the novel “teaches the reader how to read it, with its discussions of art, psychology, and philosophy being clues to its own design.” When Kyle and I met our conversations quickly took on an aesthetic and literary dimension, and I hoped she might appreciate the book as I had. I sent her a copy. When we discussed it she told me that she really liked the narrator Ada—and her friend in the story, a female painter named Kyle—and I knew for sure we could share many things.

Eyewitnesses to History

While Senior Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Kodansha America from 1992-97, I endorsed the recommendation of editorial colleague Deborah Baker who proposed we acquire trade paperback rights from Times Books/Random House to then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama’s family memoir Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which we published in 1996 as a title in the Kodansha Globe series, a nonfiction trade paperback program that paved the way for such successful series as NYRB Classics. At Kodansha I also worked with the prolific diarist and octogenarian Edward Robb Ellis, establishing an affinity in me for editing epistolary works. When his magnum opus, A Diary of the Century: Tales from America’s Greatest Diarist, was published in October 1995, though exclusive arrangements usually applied with the TV network morning shows, Ellis achieved the rare hat trick of being interviewed by Cokie Roberts on ABC, Katie Couric on NBC, and Harry Smith on CBS on their respective morning shows.

By coincidence, my next job was Executive Editor for Times Books/Random House, from 1997-2000. Newly ensconced there, I was submitted a manuscript that I knew would shock the conscience of readers, the true story of an innocent man on Virginia’s Death Row. The heart of the book was the diary of the inmate, which co-authors Joe Jackson and William Burke used skillfully in building their powerful narrative, with first-person diary entries laced through their prose. It was submitted to me during a hot summer, and when the authors chronicled the suffocatingly sultry conditions in the prison, it all but sparked a raging fever in me. With my reaction, it struck me that William Styron, a son of Virginia whose social justice advocacy included vocal opposition to capital punishment, would be outraged at the rank injustice. Through Styron’s Random House editor Robert Loomis, I got the manuscript to “Bill,” as Loomis called him, and began a dialogue with the novelist who offered to write an Introduction to the book, DEAD RUN: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America. 

When I received the draft of his essay, I noted that it revealed the ultimate fate of the inmate Stockton, something I had thought we might not let slip. I called Styron, and suggested that we might refrain from doing this, to which he responded, “The specter of doom hangs over Mr. Stockton from the manuscript’s first page.” I realized he was correct, and forswore my original intention. Styron’s eloquent Introduction shone a bright light on the miscarriage of justice in the book.

As a person, I am not overly concerned about what people seem to think of me, nor do I crave lots of personal validation from others. Yet it’s an occupational hazard of the book business; as an editor and advocate for books, one is invariably focused on what people think of your titles—by publishing house colleagues, and among booksellers, sales reps, agents, foreign scouts, critics, and readers. My aspirations for my books are often sustained by blurbs, reviews, and word-of-mouth, or deflated by the lack of them. In the case of Dead Run, I was blessed by the enthusiasm of Loomis and Styron, which nourished my hopes for the book with such ardency that I was inspired to mint a quip I’m still fond of sharing about my profession: “Being an editor allows me to express my latent religiosity, since I spend so much time praying for my books.”

 At Times Books, I continued working with authors of advanced age, publishing EXODUS 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation by the trailblazing photojournalist Ruth Gruber (1911-2016), who following the Holocaust had covered the voyage of the real-life Exodus ship and became the foremost chronicler of displaced persons (DPs) in Europe during the postwar years.

As Editor-in-Chief with Carroll & Graf from 2000-2006, I edited and published THE REVENANT, an historical novel and wilderness survival tale that was the first book I acquired after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when colleagues and I fled from our offices just blocks from the World Trade Center; though novels don’t usually carry subtitles, I suggested to author Michael Punke that he append a tag line to his book which to this day is known as A Novel of Revenge. Other books of mine during this period included national bestseller THE POLITICS OF TRUTH: Inside the Lies that Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (2004) by Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who upon his death in 2019 was still a hero to many for his vocal opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq; THE BABY THIEF: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption (2007) by Barbara Bisantz Raymond, an exposé of a nefarious baby broker, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and the cri-de-coeur SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force during the genocide in Rwanda. As Editorial Director of Union Square Press at Sterling Publishing, in 2008 I published COVERT: My Years Infiltrating the Mob by NBA referee Bob Delaney with Dave Scheiber, a USA TODAY Best Book of the Year, a memoir of the author’s three-year high-wire undercover stint investigating organized crime.

The above books all shared a common feature: They were written by and/or about singular witnesses to history–insiders, whistleblowers, truthtellers, muckrakers, revisionist historians–people who’d passed through a crucible of experience that left them with elevated authority in the eyes of the reading public, and the only person who could write the book in question, or about whom it could be written. Whether told in the first person by an author whose personal experience leaves them uniquely qualified to tell the tale, or in the third person by a reporter or scholar who has pursued a story or historical episode with single-minded passion, I remain devoted to working with authors like these, publishing imperative books that really matter in people’s lives.

I am enormously grateful for the opportunity to have worked in my family’s bookstores, and in publishing with eight different in-house jobs, and still be working in the book business, now independently for more than a decade. My experimental education turned out to be no hindrance at all, but an ideal prelude. The work has rarely been humdrum, but instead a continually stimulating, collegial, and rewarding field. While not working in the profession I had in college imagined for myself, many of the books I’ve worked on have been expressions of the search for social justice that fueled my education. I’m happy to close by noting that the familial nature of my endeavors continues with the advent in January 2020 of my adult son Ewan Turner as Executive Editor of the editorial consultancy and literary agency I now operate.

**Alas, the light editing that was done seems to have led to the excision of the lines just above, “I’m happy to close by noting that the familial nature of my endeavors continues with the advent in January 2020 of my adult son Ewan Turner working as Executive Editor of the editorial consultancy and literary agency I now operate.” I suppose this was because it was the last line in the whole piece and the layout was bumping up against the bottom of the page. That’s why I’m happy that I have this website, so I can run every word of the original text here, and with all the Internet links I had included in it, anticipating some day publishing the entire essay on this blog (and in the event there was a digital edition of the book). It’s also given me the opportunity to write the Introduction to it above, and offer all the context that I have above in the “The Story Behind a Handsome New Book on Books.”

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15

Listing Notable Current Affairs Titles I’ve Worked On

For an editorial assignment on a current affairs title with a major publisher that I’m being considered for—in what amounts to a competitive situation among other candidates—I listed a dozen notable titles I’ve acquired, edited, published, and/or agented over my years in publishing. Below is a screenshot of that list for readers of this blog who may be curious about some of the titles I’ve chosen to work on and be involved with over the years. I should add there are many such titles beyond this dozen. Please let me know if the editorial and publishing services provided by me and my business partner Ewan Turner might be of interest to you.

*So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq by Greg Mitchell, w/a Preface by Bruce Springsteen; The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bizants Raymond, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq by Michael Goldfarb, a NY Times Notable Book.

16

Sold to Broadleaf Books: “Living with Horror: Faith and Fright in an Anxious World”

Delighted to have sold biblical scholar Brandon Grafius’s book “Living with Horror: Faith and Fright in an Anxious World” to Broadleaf Books of Minneapolis. It will be a thought-provoking study that explores the parallels between horror and religion, and the common ground shared by fear and faith, offering insight into many of the provocative and surprising theological themes that lurk under the surface of favorite horror films, while also discussing many of the movies, alongside a catalog of biblical stories that evoke fear and trembling. The fears that horror movies force to the surface of consciousness can help us reflect on our own troubled times, and will help readers gain a sense of understanding into the nature of fear and associated emotions. Grafius’s book will also provide an outlet for people struggling to contextualize what they are seeing each day on the news. By examining the themes of hope and faith, and justice and perseverance, all found in horror movies, it will show the reader how horror can help us make sense of the world, and help us all navigate the anxieties that are part of modern life, especially in pandemic times.

Delighted that the author will be working with a very engaged editor at Broadleaf, Lil Copan, who has a vision for the book that really aligns with the author’s book idea. Broadleaf has an interesting list which I commend to readers’ attention.

And, kudos to my adult son and business partner, Ewan Turner, who championed Brandon’s book from the first day he queried us about it.